Noah Stewart: The tenor who never quite quit

Noah Stewart’s struggle from Harlem’s mean streets to the world’s opera stages
sounds like a plot of a Hollywood film. The first black artist to top the
classical chart tells his story to Adam Sweeting
.

The world’s opera houses couldn’t be said to be teeming with black American tenors, let alone openly gay ones, and Noah Stewart’s journey from Harlem to Covent Garden and the classical CD charts is the stuff that Hollywood screenplays are made of.

Raised by his single mother, Patricia, who worked as a cashier in Harlem’s Food Emporium grocery store, Noah, 34, has battled hammer and tongs to carve out a career in an elite white world. After suffering rejections and false starts, he can safely say he has arrived.

We meet at the east London rehearsal complex where Noah is preparing to sing Don José in Raymond Gubbay’s outsized production of Bizet’s Carmen as it returns to the Royal Albert Hall. “We’re pushing the idea of Don José as a dangerous character, the bad guy, and it’s great fun for me to play,” he explains. For inspiration, he’s carrying Jerome Hines’s book Great Singers On Great Singing, in which the likes of Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland and Franco Corelli discuss their art. “Growing up in Harlem, I was obsessed with Pavarotti,” he admits. “It seems to me he was the last great tenor in terms of having that perfect technique where it looked so easy.”

Stewart’s infatuation with opera must be ascribed to nature rather than nurture. There were no musicians in his family, and most of his contemporaries wanted to be rappers or basketball players. “We grew up in the Baptist church, but I don’t have memories of singing gospel music,” he says. “But I didn’t grow up singing classical music either.”

He recalls his first “lightbulb moment” occurring when he won a singing competition in his last year of junior high school: “That made me think I could achieve a career in music.”

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Going on to study performing arts at Manhattan’s LaGuardia high school, he was galvanised by a meeting with the soprano Leontyne Price when she did a record signing at the Metropolitan Opera. “I said: 'Miss Price, you are such an inspiration, you’ve really drawn me to opera,’ and she said: 'What’s your next step?’ ” He told her he aimed to go to the Juilliard School, and she urged him to “give ’em hell!”

Noah duly won a scholarship to Juilliard when he was 17 and, though he found the going hard and competitive, he completed his course and graduated.

However, this success went to his head (“I thought I knew it all, of course!”). He opted not to take up a place at the Manhattan School of Music, and instead attempted to strike out on a solo career but, after three years of mostly abortive auditions and competitions, he was floundering. He survived by waitering and working as a receptionist at Carnegie Hall, where he was told off for humming while he worked.

“I almost quit singing,” he says. “But I learnt that it’s not enough to say: 'I have a great voice and I look good,’ because so do lots of other people. You have to make an investment in yourself, and you need the constant hunger and desire to be better.”

In the nick of time, he was saved by San Francisco Opera, who accepted him into its summer music programme. Suddenly it all started to click, and he was invited to join the company’s fellowship programme for young singers. After singing in everything from Philip Glass to Verdi, he returned to New York, found himself an agent and went to work.

Now he’s seeing the rewards. His debut CD for Decca last year, a mixture of gospel songs, hymns and operatic pieces, made him the first black artist to top the UK’s classical chart, while his operatic career has taken him to Opera North to sing Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, then to a Covent Garden debut in Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, and to Detroit to sing Nadir in The Pearl Fishers.

“Singing Nadir was great,” he recalls. “I was shirtless most of the time, which was a good thing I guess because it forced me to get back in the gym! I love food, but it’s important to look like your characters, and I think guys who dive for pearls are in good shape.”

A reliable indicator of his ascent was an invitation to appear on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs last year. His musical choices exhibited a breezy eclecticism that spanned Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald and Cyndi Lauper as well operatic icons Beniamino Gigli and Leontyne Price. His castaway book was The Joy of Cooking.

Even his mother has finally grasped the scale of her son’s achievements. “I was staying with her in New York, and when I was practising she’d say: 'Why do you keep singing that over and over – didn’t you do that yesterday?’ I said, 'No, Ma, it’s like tennis – you have to practise the fore hand over and over so you know exactly where the ball will land. I think now she gets it.”